Adrienne Sharp: The True Memoirs of Little K

So. That was our second encounter and it was not much. I understood from it that it would not be as easy for me as it had been for Princess Ekaterina Dolgorukaya, whose tsar lover did not cower behind balcony railings but instead boldly arranged to meet her again in the Summer Garden on those paths beneath the linden, and just as boldly ravished her one afternoon in the Babigon Pavilion at Peterhof on a beautiful July day, the Gulf of Finland glinting in the distance, heat and perfume everywhere, flower petals crushed between her fingers.

No. Those next few weeks I would ride around and around the city with the family’s Russian coachman I begged from my father. Not every family could afford its own coachman, especially a Russian coachman in his centuries-old costume who drove with his arms held out stiffly in front of him as if in balletic port de bras and who, as we plowed our way through the streets, shouted throatily at every other carriage, cart, and person in our way. Though I wanted to show him off, as well as myself, I might as well have stayed at home. For though I drove along the Morskaya, strolled Nevsky Prospekt, applauded the races at the Horse Ménage, even in a ridiculous act of desperation paced once again back and forth on Karavannaya Street across from the Anichkov Palace, the tsarevich took no notice of me at all. The stage for my seduction was not meant to be Petersburg, though I did not know this, but most unexpectedly the summer encampment at Krasnoye Selo in August.

The Imperial Guards of Petersburg and dozens of regiments from the provinces converged at Krasnoye Selo for summer maneuvers away from the Petersburg heat and swirling dust, 130,000 men in their pale canvas tents erected by the great parade ground along the Dudergov and Ligovka rivers. How the Romanovs loved their uniforms and their bugles and their horses! Niki’s great-grandfather Nicholas I would weep at the sight of a great group of uniformed soldiers. There were white tunics and scarlet, the long blue coats and gold belts of the Cossacks, the Golden Grenadiers in their gray coats and tall gilded helmets—each regiment with its own epaulets, ribbons, braids, crosses, medals, ornaments, hats. Some regiments wore papakhi of bleached lamb, other Cossack regiments wore dark wool; still other officers sported visored caps festooned with feathers and medallions. Until almost the end of his life, Nicholas fiddled with the uniforms of his regiments, adding a row of buttons here, another golden braid.

He had talent as an artist, you know, had been taught to handle pencils and watercolors by Kyril Lemokh, the curator of art in the Russian Museum of Alexander III. He drew landscapes. I saw a few. One sketch held no figures, only a tree, a field, a red dirt road glowing like brick in the sun; in another a small wooden boat had just been pushed off from the shore, and one could see a lone figure hunched on it, two men on the very edge of the land who must have shoved the boat off for their friend, the tall, tall grove of birch trees in the background dwarfing them all. They were pictures drawn by a boy who loved the natural world and who found in it a place where a tsar was not a giant but simply part of a larger whole. But Niki gave up painting, other than making sketches in his record book of the gifts he was given. And later in life, I suppose, uniforms became the paper he drew upon.

The big show on the vast plain at Krasnoye Selo shimmered in the late July heat, the waves of heat soothed into stillness only when they reached the woods and hills that marked the boundaries of the big grassy space, which served as stage for the precision marching, the smart turns and lunges with saber and bayonet. The elite of Petersburg society turned out for the Great Review, seated in stalls near a thatch of trees, the women wearing summer whites, their hats and parasols caught by the breeze, undulating like the leaves and catkins of the beech trees above them. The ministers of the court stood in their tails and top hats beneath tents on the Emperor’s Mound, and the tsar, the empress, and the grand dukes and duchesses inspected the troops from their horses and carriages, then joined the ministers to survey the rows and rows of men who filled the plain, marching in unison, flags held high. The next two wars Russia fought would be disastrous failures for her, leaving men like these and millions of others lying dead on the battlefields across Europe and Russia. But no one would have guessed this then.

No, that summer in 1892, at Krasnoye Selo these actors stood out on that great plain enacting battles they never lost.

This, however, was not theater enough. There must be evening entertainment, as well.

And so a wooden theater in the Russian style was built at Krasnoye Selo, a theater as big as the Mikhailovsky in Peter, a bright place of balconies hung with striped silk drapes and tasseled valances, and we artists performed there twice a week in July and the first part of August, when the grand dukes and the emperor and his family came to the camp, leaving behind their marble palaces to stay in their graceful wooden villas, with canvas awnings and wide verandas. In the evenings, all the theater artists stood at attention in the theater windows that overlooked the private imperial entrance to salute the imperial entourage as they disembarked from their landaus and troikas. The men wore their military regalia even to the theater. The grand dukes all sat in the first row; in the second and third ones sat their officers, with the ladies after and junior officers beyond, and in boxes opposite one another sat the tsar’s family and the families of the ministers of the court and the military. I used to spot my turns by all the medals and decorations shining on the men’s breasts.

The grand dukes and the emperor and the tsarevich always stopped by after lunch to chat with the dancers or to watch rehearsals, and they mounted the stage between the evening’s entertainments—a comedy first and a ballet divertissement second—to greet all the performers. Great beauty, which I did not possess, could shape one’s fate. And so I worked even harder to shape mine, with my pretty hands and my little feet and my lively conversation. Like my father, I have always been gay, with the gift to make those around me also so. And this was how Nicholas was finally drawn to me—by my charm. He would seek me out on that stage and stand in the sun to chat with me, showing his white teeth at my jokes, while I tried to hide my crooked ones. Sometimes I touched a button on his tunic or rose en pointe or made flying birds of my hands in my rapture at being so close to him. I had noted how Niki seemed most at ease around those who were merry, like us theater artists or like his rowdy cousins, the Mikhailovichi, or his fellow officers at camp, with whom Niki drank himself beyond drunkenness until they all played “the wolves,” which involved crawling naked in the grass, howling and biting one another, before drinking on all fours from vats of champagne and vodka their obliging servants hauled out for the young men’s pleasure. One afternoon, in my hurry to make sure I didn’t miss the chance for conversation before rehearsal, I ran onto the little stage right into the uniformed belly of the emperor, who took one look at my flushed face and said, You must have been flirting . But he was wrong. I was just eager to begin! My brief moments with the tsarevich at camp were more important to me than the evening’s show, and they were still all I had of him.

Yet it was not only with Nicholas that I chatted, for when else would so many Romanov men be assembled in a single place to which I had access? I attempted to charm every man with a title—who knew what use he might one day be for me?—including Grand Duke Vladimir, one of Niki’s many uncles, who served as minister of the Imperial Theaters and was a great lover of the arts. An old man, but a valuable one—no?—given his position. He would come sit in my dressing room and visit with me while I painted my lips red. He didn’t talk but rather boomed wherever he went, and his voice from his box could be heard all over the theater as he commented on the dancers. What? What is this? A sparrow? he cried when a young, thin girl appeared, poor thing, to perform a few spindly steps. Or he bellowed, Let us all go home , when the first-act curtain fell on a ballet he didn’t like. Vladimir believed he should be a tsar rather than a grand duke and he acted like a tsar, despite the birth order that put his brother Alexander on the throne. Vladimir’s wife, Miechen, the second-ranking woman in the empire, carried on like a tsaritsa herself. It was her annual Christmas bazaar in the Hall of Nobles which heralded Peter’s holiday season. The Empress Vladimir , Niki’s mother bitterly called her. The day the tsar’s train derailed in 1888, almost crushing the imperial family as they ate chocolate pudding in the dining car, was for Vladimir a day close to triumph. We shall never have such a chance again , Miechen whispered indiscreetly to her friends at court. At Krasnoye Selo, Vladimir gave me his photograph to keep in my dressing room. Yes, the imperial family signed photographs of themselves for their intimates the way cinema stars do for their fans today—and on mine Vladimir inscribed the words Bonjour, dushka , which meant little darling , and he sighed that he was too old for me.